Following his letter in the Press, wherein he had seen machines as in process of becoming animate, he went on to regard them as living organs and limbs which we had made outside ourselves.  What would follow if we reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as machines which we had manufactured as parts of our bodies?  In the first place, how did we come to make them without knowing anything about it?  But then, how comes anybody to do anything unconsciously?  The answer usually would be:  By habit.  But can a man be said to do a thing by habit when he has never done it before?  His ancestors have done it, but not he.  Can the habit have been acquired by them for his benefit?  Not unless he and his ancestors are the same person.  Perhaps, then, they are the same person.

In February, 1876, partly to clear his mind and partly to tell someone, he wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his namesake, Thomas William Gale Butler, a fellow art-student who was then in New Zealand; so much of the letter as concerns the growth of his theory is given in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912) and a resume of the theory will be found at the end of the last of the essays in this volume, “The Deadlock in Darwinism.”  In September, 1877, when Life and Habit was on the eve of publication, Mr. Francis Darwin came to lunch with him in Clifford’s Inn and, in course of conversation, told him that Professor Ray Lankester had written something in Nature about a lecture by Dr. Ewald Hering of Prague, delivered so long ago as 1870, “On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter.”  This rather alarmed Butler, but he deferred looking up the reference until after December, 1877, when his book was out, and then, to his relief, he found that Hering’s theory was very similar to his own, so that, instead of having something sprung upon him which would have caused him to want to alter his book, he was supported.  He at once wrote to the Athenaeum, calling attention to Hering’s lecture, and then pursued his studies in evolution.

Life and Habit was followed in 1879 by Evolution Old and New, wherein he compared the teleological or purposive view of evolution taken by Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck with the view taken by Charles Darwin, and came to the conclusion that the old was better.  But while agreeing with the earlier writers in thinking that the variations whose accumulation results in species were originally due to intelligence, he could not take the view that the intelligence resided in an external personal God.  He had done with all that when he gave up the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  He proposed to place the intelligence inside the creature ("The Deadlock in Darwinism” post).